“I often think I have the soul of a slave” — The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch.
Funny how traces of D/s & power exchange appear in the most unexpected corners of mainstream literature.
We’ve always been there—just between the lines.
#BDSMInLiterature #ItsInOurNature
An 1885 oil painting by English artist George Frederic Watts, entitled 'Mammon. Dedicated to his Worshippers' Wikipedia writes: "Mammon shows a scene from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in which Mammon, the embodiment of greed, crushes the weak through his indifference to their plight. This reflected Watts's belief that wealth was taking the place of religion in modern society, and that this worship of riches was leading to social deterioration." Tate Modern writes: "‘Mammon’ is a term from the Bible. It refers to riches and the corrupting influence of wealth. Here, Watts personifies Mammon as an ogre-like figure. He is shown sitting on a throne adorned with skulls, moneybags on his lap. Watts reveals Mammon’s ignorance through the ass’s ears on his golden crown. Young, beautiful worshippers are shown lifeless, crushed under his foot. Watts wrote in 1880: ‘Material prosperity has become our real god, but we are surprised to find that the worship of this visible deity does not make us happy.’ This dark subject was particularly commented on when the work was displayed at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the world fair held in Paris." From a Guardian article: "A painting such as Mammon (1884-85) shows Watts pushing beyond his earlier sculptural realism to test how far he can warp and stretch the human form. Indeed Mammon’s central swollen papal-like figure with its donkey head and ears and distorted gouty leg looks almost as if it could come from Francis Bacon. In addition, the surfaces of Watts paintings are often scarred and ridged, as if pulling away from the flat canvas. So much so that when Fry was asked to account for the way that cubism seemed to have burst out of nowhere in 1907, he explained briskly “it was quite easy to make the transition from Watts to Picasso; there was no break, only a continuation”."
In the introductory stage directions of her only play, she refers to... this painting, described by Wikipedia as "the embodiment of greed, crushes the weak through his indifference to their plight."
#findom anyone?
#notsoserious #virginiaiskinky #bdsminliterature
